


maybe this thing was a masterpiece till you tore it all up

by kathillards



Category: Kamen Rider Decade
Genre: Multi, post decade zi-o eps
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-14
Updated: 2019-01-14
Packaged: 2019-10-10 03:50:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17418551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kathillards/pseuds/kathillards
Summary: The Destroyer of Worlds has some rounds to make.





	maybe this thing was a masterpiece till you tore it all up

**Author's Note:**

> tsukasa is such a bitch in zi-o, i can only come to the conclusion that all his datemates have dumped him.

 

Yuusuke is never angry.

It is, Tsukasa thinks as he steps through the—unlocked, although it hadn’t been that way when he got there—door to the small apartment without an invitation, one of the things he likes best about him. Yuusuke Onodera always manages a smile and a thumbs up somehow, even if the whole world is shaking around him.

Even if Tsukasa is the reason for it.

He drops down onto the green couch—it’s new, he notes in a corner of his brain; he’d had a brown couch last time Tsukasa had visited. But maybe it’s been a while and he hadn’t even noticed. Time is hard to keep track of when you’re world-hopping. At least, that’s what he tells himself.

Everything is quiet for a while. Yuusuke usually has a radar for when Tsukasa is in town; he wouldn’t leave him alone for this long. He’s starting to get restless when someone comes down the hallway from the bedroom.

Tsukasa stares. “Who are you?”

The man, someone he’s never met before, frowns at him, shrugging on his jacket. He’s tall—not as tall as Tsukasa, but reasonably tall—and has light brown hair that flops into his eyes in a way that makes him look all windswept and pathetic. His face is one of those blandly pretty ones, no sharp corners, no edges. Boring.

In Tsukasa’s opinion, at least.

“I’m… a friend of Yuusuke’s,” says the man. “Who are _you_?”

The sheer offense that someone who claims to be a _friend_ of _Yuusuke’s_ doesn’t know who he is stops him from speaking for a good long moment.

“I’m—”

Whatever he had been about to say—and it certainly wasn’t going to be his _name_ —is interrupted by Yuusuke emerging into the room.

“Tsukasa,” he says in a mild sort of surprise. “You’re back early.”

“You know him?” asks the other man.

Unable to help himself, Tsukasa snipes, “You know _him_?” at Yuusuke.

Yuusuke looks skyward for a moment, as if praying, then walks over and gently presses the stranger’s shoulders to usher him across the room and out the door. “See you next time, okay?” he says, squeezing his arm.

When the door closes on his expression of confusion, it sounds louder than normal.

Tsukasa raises an eyebrow. “Next time?”

“Don’t worry about it,” says Yuusuke. He takes a deep breath, and plasters a smile on his face. “Do you want dinner? I have fish and—”

“Do Natsumi and Daiki know about him?” he interrupts.

Yuusuke goes still and then exhales a huff of laughter. “That is… so not your business.”

The words sting, just a little. “How is it not my business?”

“Okay.” Yuusuke crosses his arms and squares himself up, looking Tsukasa in the eye. He’s still shorter than him but in the years since they traveled together, he seems to have gotten—more well-settled in his skin, perhaps. Not quite as scrawny. More put-together. Tsukasa has to fight the urge to reach out, to touch him, to trace the muscles of his arms and the lines of his jaw. “Then where have you been?”

It’s a distinctly Natsumi-esque question. Tsukasa kind of gets the impression those two see each other more often than he sees either of them.

That stings, too.

“I was… imparting my wisdom onto a new Rider,” he says magnanimously. “It was very important. End of the world sort of thing. You know how it is.”

Yuusuke nods and then asks, “Zi-O?”

Tsukasa blinks, taken aback despite himself. “How did you…?”

“You’re an idiot, Tsukasa,” says Yuusuke with a deep, world-weary sigh. “If you think I don’t keep tabs on you.”

With this piece of knowledge thus dropped in front of Tsukasa, he crosses the space between them—for a moment, a sliver of a second, Tsukasa thinks he might stop right in front of him, but he doesn’t—and then walks past him into his tiny kitchen and begins rummaging around in the fridge.

“I’ll make extra,” Yuusuke says over his shoulder, as he pulls food items from the fridge—fish, and vegetables, he thinks. “In case you want to stay.”

Tsukasa scratches the back of his head. He tries not to make a habit of staying in one place too long, but…

But it’s Yuusuke. So he sucks up his pride and turns around.

“Are the others…”

He doesn’t need to finish the question.

Yuusuke waves a hand as he turns his stove on. “They’re around. They’re… happy.” Before Tsukasa can figure out how to react to this, he takes the knife he’d set on the counter and points it at him warningly. “By the way, I wouldn’t try this ‘who is _that_?’ scene with either of them. You remember when we agreed we should see other people?”

“I don’t remember actually agreeing to that,” Tsukasa protests. It hadn’t been his favorite conversation. “Wait, you mean—”

“I’m just saying, don’t be surprised.” Yuusuke shrugs, as casual as if this doesn’t require a full shift in his worldview, and puts the fish in the stove. “We do things too, you know. Just not always as… epic and Kamen Rider-y as the stuff you do.”

“I know that.” Tsukasa walks over and leans across the kitchen counter, waiting until Yuusuke turns away from the stove to look at him. “Is he a better kisser than me?”

Yuusuke drops a kitchen towel on his face. “Shut up.”

.

.

.

Natsumi isn’t angry, but she should be.

She’s not home when he enters the photo studio, so this is what he tells himself to feel better as he looks around at the customers milling in the waiting room. The lighting is better now, the room seems a little more spacious than it had been when he’d lived here. Maybe they’d upgraded. The prices have shot up, too.

And there’s two people he doesn’t recognize working at the front desk, taking orders, answering the phone, dealing with questions about the packages and the pricing and the backdrops.

One of them looks at him and doesn’t seem to recognize him at all. “If you’re waiting for Miss Hikari, she’ll be in later this afternoon.”

 _Miss Hikari_? Tsukasa stares at the girl—fairly young, with reddish hair and a bright face and a voice so bubbly you could make soda from it—and waits until she meets his gaze to level the best force of his Destroyer of Worlds look on her.

The effect is immediate. She quails and turns hastily back to her coworker, her skin going pale.

How he had missed that.

With the receptionists properly distracted, Tsukasa walks through the waiting room and into the back, disregarding the other boy’s “Hey!” when he finally notices. The door shuts behind him before either of the two can do anything about it and then he is confronted with the unsettling reality that the home behind the photo studio is… empty.

Feeling a little pathetic, he asks, “Grandpa?” and then, after a moment of silence, “…Kiva-la?”

There’s a picture on the mantlepiece—actually, there’s a lot of pictures, but this one strikes him because it’s of the four of them. Ten years younger, smiles wide, a blank backdrop behind them. Even Daiki is grinning. They all look… happy.

The side door that leads to the backyard opens and Tsukasa turns around with some measure of relief—nostalgia isn’t the best thing for him these days; he has a reputation to keep up—to find Natsumi standing there.

Her hair is up in a ponytail. For some reason, this is the first difference he notices instead of the fact that she has a cut bleeding on her cheek and a bruise on her leg.

Stupidly, he says, “You changed your hair.”

Natsumi stares at him for a long, awkward minute, and then replies, “You didn’t.”

Tsukasa moves forward and hesitates when he’s in front of her. It’s been a long time since they helped each other clean up after a fight. “What happened to you?”

“Nothing.” Natsumi touches her cheek to check if it’s still bleeding—it is—and then shoulders her way past him. “I have to get ready. We have clients…”

“Really?” Tsukasa swivels after her, like a magnet pointing north. “No welcome home party?”

“You should see Daiki for that,” she tosses over her shoulder, and disappears into her bedroom.

Tsukasa waits a beat—his common sense tells him this isn’t the best idea; the part of him that can’t stand her cold shoulder wins out—and then follows her into her bedroom. She hadn’t locked it, so, really, that was on her.

“Tsukasa,” Natsumi sighs. She’s pulled her ponytail out, her hair covering up what might be another bruise on her shoulder he hadn’t noticed earlier, and shrugged her jacket off. “You can’t just—”

“What, there are no boys allowed in your room anymore?” he teases. She rolls her eyes at him and he takes that as the opening he needs to sweep past her to the dresser where he knows she keeps her first-aid kit. “Things sure have changed since the last time I was here.”

“Not really.” Natsumi’s voice goes soft as he pulls out the cotton pads and the bandages. “It’s just you’re not around anymore to see how they’re the same.”

Tsukasa files that away to poke at later and turns to her, pressing a cotton pad to her cheek to wipe away the blood. “You’re still doing the Kamen Rider thing, then?”

She smiles a little and stands there and lets him. “It’s hard to stop, once you start.”

This, he knows well. All four of them could tell anyone that.

He works in silence for a minute, listening to the sound of her breathing getting slower and more even—it must have been a hard fight, he thinks—as he cleans the blood off and then puts the bandage over the cut, careful not to press too hard. His hand lingers on her cheek and since she hasn’t pushed him away, he blurts out—

“Are you seeing someone too?”

Natsumi quirks an eyebrow and then laughs. “You think this is me ‘seeing someone’?”

She gestures to herself, her outfit covered in dust and the other bruises visible on her body, the scent of a fight all over her. Like any of that makes her undesirable.

“Maybe?” It’s not like he hasn’t _seen_ people he’s fought before. Most of his relationships seem to start off like that. If they can be called relationships. “Yuusuke said…I don’t know.”

Natsumi knocks her fingers into the side of his head, making him blink and then pout at her. “You’re being stupid. If you feel guilty about something, just apologize.”

“I’m sorry.”

“To _him_.”

Tsukasa sighs. Apologizing to Daiki is a fair bit different from apologizing to Natsumi. Mostly because he knows she’ll forgive him. They’ve known each other too long for anything else.

“And I don’t need to apologize to you?”

Natsumi shrugs and moves out of his reach. Immediately, he feels colder. “Whatever you did to Zi-O, his world is still standing, so it can’t have been that bad.”

He doesn't bother to ask how she knows, this time.

“It was pretty bad,” he protests, not sure why he feels the need to defend his villainous behavior. “He’s, like, thirteen. I think I made him cry.”

Natsumi thinks about that for a minute, then decides, “Still not the worst thing you’ve ever done.”

Tsukasa frowns. She’s right, but it stings, too.

“Besides,” she continues, “I thought we agreed, we could do what we want in other worlds as long as…”

“Yeah,” he says with a roll of his eyes. “As long as we don’t go crazy and try to kill each other or everyone in the world. Again.”

Natsumi smiles at him and writes something down on a piece of paper from her bedside table. “Here,” she says, pressing it into his hands. “He’ll be there.”

Tsukasa doesn’t ask who he is. “Thanks, Natsumikan,” he murmurs, and before she can protest, he leans over to press a kiss to her forehead. “You always know what to say.”

.

.

.

Daiki is always angry.

This, at least, will never change. Tsukasa leans against a tree and watches Kamen Rider DiEnd beat up some rather uniquely ugly mooks from whatever world this is that Natsumi had sent him to and ponders that in all these years—ten and more, stretching all the way back to his days as the leader of DaiShocker—Daiki has barely changed at all.

Natsumi and Yuusuke, they’re different now that they’re older. She has her photo studio, he has his martial arts classes. She teaches self-defense on the weekends and he consults for the police. They don’t let him get away with as much shit as they did when they were younger. He misses them more than he did when he was younger.

Daiki, though, is another kettle of fish entirely.

“So,” he says when his armor fades and his gaze lands on Tsukasa, “the Destroyer of Worlds is back.”

There’s an edge to his voice when he says _the Destroyer of Worlds_ , but that’s been there since the whole thing with Captain Marvelous and the sentais, so Tsukasa doesn’t think much of it.

“Did you miss me?”

Daiki taps his gun against the palm of his hand, like he’s contemplating shooting it. Out of instinct, Tsukasa reaches behind him in case he needs to grab his driver. It never hurts to be prepared, around Daiki Kaitou.

“Sometimes,” Daiki admits finally, and this is enough of a shock that Tsukasa freezes. “Gets kind of boring without you around, you know that?”

He smirks, like he knows he’s caught Tsukasa off-guard, and walks carefully closer to him. His hair is long enough to flip up at the edges again—he’d cut it sometime in the intervening years between _then_ and _now_ and it had only just grown out again—and he’s wearing black and blue, the colors dark against his skin. There’s a mark on his throat that could be bruise or it could be a hickey and there are beads of sweat on his neck from the fight he’d just finished.

“I can tell,” Tsukasa says when he’s remembered his voice. “You look like a fucking mess.”

When Daiki crushes his mouth to his, it’s a release and a ransom at the same time. His kiss isn’t as warm as Yuusuke, not as pleasant as Natsumi, but it is red-hot and burning and messy and it guts Tsukasa right through his bones, leaves him feeling strung-out and surrendered in the best of ways. He never wants it to end; can't remember why it ever did in the first place.

“I heard you traumatized another rider,” Daiki mutters, pulling back just to watch Tsukasa breathe heavy and uneven with the slightest hint of a smile on his face. “And you didn’t even invite us.”

“I thought it would have bored you,” Tsukasa admits, strokes his thumb over Daiki’s jawline. “There’s only so many times you can scare the shit out of a new guy, right?”

“You keep doing it,” Daiki points out, and the hurt underlying those words is louder than his breathing. The moon slants silver over him, like a spotlight.

“Only because you don’t tell me to stay.”

The honesty feels like it’s been wrenched out of him by Daiki’s kiss. It’s things that have always gone unsaid with Natsumi and Yuusuke, that need to be said here, when it’s just the two of them. He can’t rely on things unsaid with Daiki, not when he takes everything so personally.

Daiki looks at him carefully, and then steps back, out of his reach. Tsukasa’s hand twitches, but he keeps himself still with a great force of effort.

“I was…” Daiki pauses, licks his lips. “I was going to go visit Natsumi. Tomorrow, I mean. Yuusuke said he’d be there, so…”

It’s an invitation. Tsukasa isn’t stupid enough to refuse it. Not when it’s been so long since the four of them were together that he’s forgotten why they ever split up.

The two of them start walking, side by side, footsteps in sync, back to wherever it is Daiki is squatting here, and he can’t resist asking, “Are you going to bring your boyfriend?”

Daiki shoves his shoulder into him, and he forgets for a moment that Yuusuke isn’t on the other side to catch him and goes stumbling.

“I’ll bring mine when you bring yours,” says Daiki with a scoff.

“Which one?” Tsukasa teases.

“The one I like.”

“You don’t like any of them.”

Daiki shoots him a look. “Exactly.”

Tsukasa nudges his arm. "So it's like that?"

"Yeah." Daiki exhales and looks up at the moon rising high above this quiet, distant world. For the first time in a long time, home feels like a tangible thing in the horizon. "It's like that."


End file.
